Research Interests:

Summary of Recent Relevant Research:

Realism-based ontology is a key competence of the Ontology Research Group of the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences which includes researchers from the departments of Philosophy and Psychiatry and the Dental School. Relevant projects fall in three categories: (1) building domain ontologies (e.g. infectious diseases, adverse events, ...) based on the upper ontology ‘Basic Formal Ontology” (BFO); (2) building application ontologies based on the former, but designed for specific purposes (battlefield awareness, detecting risks against patient safety in hospitals, …) and (3) making heterogeneous information systems semantically interoperable by building ontologies that describe the portions of reality about which data are stored in these systems, and by applying the Referent Tracking paradigm which aims to assign globally and singular unique identifiers to each entity in reality about which data is stored in any of the information systems.